About 200 students attended a full day of workshops to learn about the tiny electronic brains that control almost all the cool devices that define the digital age.

A dozen companies that make microprocessors and related components held classes to show the students the capabilities of their products and how to use them to create new things.

“They will have 20 to 40 students set up in a workshop,” said electrical engineering professor George Slack. “Each one of them has their own microcontroller, and the instructor will take them through setting up the ARM processor and basically connecting input and output devices to bring them to life.”

The event is called ARM Developer Day because all 12 companies use designs created by and licensed from ARM Holdings, an international corporation, as the basis for their processors.

Mark Williams, 24, a fifth-year RIT student from Boston, has attended all four annual events.

“I’m really into microcontrollers in general. It’s really cool to be able to build things and program them and see them work more so than just sitting at a computer and making some software happen on a computer. It’s a lot more hands on,” he said.

The hands-on workshops are valuable to future engineers, said Jason Brosler, 22, of Orange, Conn., a fifth year student.

“It's one thing to read articles online that say these are the specifications, it’s quite another to actually hold it in your hands, talk with the guys who use it. It’s a wealth of information that makes it so that you can choose the right board for the project you’re doing and start making them into actual items and products.”

ARM is not the only company designing core processors, but it’s one of the most popular, with more than 800 client partner companies.

“When you build a house, you first lay out a blueprint for that house and from there the blueprint is actually taken by a builder to actually build that house,” said Joe Bungo, ARM's university program manager.

“We do that for the processor, which is just a small part of the entire product, although it is the main brain of that product and it kind of drives that,” he said.

Today, about 40 billion devices contain microcontrollers, designed by ARM or other companies. By 2020, the number is expected to grow to 100 billion.

“Almost anything with a video display that can communicate through Wi-Fi is probably an ARM processor,” Slack said.

Bungo said embedded technology will make a huge variety of new products possible. “Things are now being developed at such a low cost and low power that the technology is becoming accessible and able to be created by so many different people,” he said.